In week 2, we started learning about the developing of the Alphabet.
The developing of the alphabet was began with ancient Egypt. Around 2700BCE, the Egyptian already had a set some 22 hieroglyphs to represent syllables. But, it seems to look as the alphabetic in nature, however, the original Egyptian did not have their own language system, so they never used this by themselves to encode the Egyptian Speech. In the middle of the Bronze Age, Semitic workers created the apparently “alphabetic” system as known as the Proto-Sinaitic script. It was developed in central Egypt and many archaeologists believed it was based on Egyptian hieroglyphs.
The script was developed into the Proto-Canaanite alphabet, finally became the south Arabian alphabet. However, this script is not considered the correct Alphabet because they still lack the characters which are represented vowels. These early non-vowels were called Arabic letters and still exist in Arabic, Hebrew, and Syriacs.
Phoenician was the first major phonemic script. It’s about twenty different letters, and it’s simple and easy for traders to learn, and one of the advantages is it could be used to write as many different languages. As the Thalassocracy allowed the script to be spread across the Mediterranean. In Greece, they’ve added the vowels in the script, so it’s the first true alphabet.
The Greeks took letter which does not represent sounds existed in Greek, and they changed them to represent the vowels. This is the creation of the “true” alphabet, which was done with the Greeks. As the years go by, through many changes, the Greek alphabet was formed as the Cumae. The Cumae was carried over by Greek colonists from Euboea to the Italian. Italian created many a variety of the alphabet to inscribe the Italic languages, one of them became the Latin alphabet, which is spread across Europe, it’s also the original of today’s alphabet.
